I'm not sure people were hating on Gnome because of performance. Their overall design decision to pretend that v3 was somehow running on a tablet instead of a desktop is still pretty questionable.
It has paid off though as touchscreen devices have become a lot more common. The fact that one can now run a modern Linux desktop on an actual tablet is also pretty nifty.
I have a Surface, easily the most popular x86 tablet.
Running Linux on it had been a nightmare, I tried surface-linux and that just broke sleep.
To this day I cannot reliably get Wi-Fi to work out of sleep despite trying every fix in the book.
Sound breaks out of sleep.
Hi-DPI support is still a joke, which is a problem when most (all?) high end x86 tablets have hi resolution screens since they're meant to be used up close.
At one point I started to get logged out every 60 seconds if I tried to put the cover on it. Turns out hibernation was improperly configured, so instead of warning me, it'd log me out, try to hibernate, then try again 60 seconds later.
Well there is fractional scaling, it just looked like garbage and had tearing.
But also handling a mix of low and high DPI displays... and any solution that includes the command `xrandr` is wrong, either because of clarity issues, or tearing/performance issues, or graphical bugs in the DE, or a mix of all of the above
I don't get it, why can't we all just copy what OSX did. They got HiDPI so right with such a flexible solution, that I literally forgot that was still a thing until my latest endeavor with Linux
I feel like I'm going crazy because every time I mention the words Linux and HiDPI I have this same conversation, and it's been happening for years.
The my takeaway is always, Linux users have ridiculously low standards for what works when it comes to UI.
The conversation usually goes something like:
"I don't know Wayland works for me with X setup"
"What about the blurriness with fractional scaling"
"Oh I'm used to it/It only happens with some programs <usually all programs using some incredibly ubiquitous UI toolkit>"
Or:
"What about when you move a window from one screen to another"
"Oh I don't do that/Oh it gets a little blurry/Oh just use X11 and <insert Xrandr hack to mess with the frame buffer>"
Or:
"What about the tearing"
"I got used to it/What tearing, I'm not gaming?"
Or:
"What resolution are your screens"
"2k small screen and 4k big screen , I can just run the same scaling on both"
I remember one time I had this conversation in person, and we failed at the, "move that window to the other monitor" step when it blew up the window to 200% size on the smaller screen.
"Why do you expect the window to automatically resize itself and change the font"
"Because the application is unusable when every UI element is twice as big as it should be?"
"But I want my application to be unusable [paraphrase], you just think it should resize because that's what OSX does, stop bringing your OSX mentality to it and it's fine"
I think that's when I should have stopped ever hoping for anything better and stop saying Linux and HiDPI in one sentence... but here we are...
GNOME on Wayland seems to handle moving windows between displays with different DPIs, it's not super graceful and seems to only apply the new DPI once >50% of the window is on the new display though.
I haven't used fractional scaling, but it's supposed to be behind a flag. But I suppose it could be blurry.
I hate to bring my OSX mentality into this... but I have no idea
OSX just has a set of "zoom" levels that let me make everything smaller or bigger in a very "fractional scaling-like" way (intermediate levels are between 100% and 200%) , and it works perfectly.
And it's not like just the font changes, it scales every type of UI element perfectly implemented with every type of UI toolkit
I know part of it is rendering to a frame buffer that's larger than the physical screen's resolution and scaling that, it might just be oversampling enough to not lose visual information when scaled back down.
But that's the beauty of HiDPI in OSX, I have literally never spent a single brain cycle trying to learn how it works, because for me as a user it's easy (just hit the size looks right), and for me as a developer it's seamless (just add 2x assets).
Sure, you can now fat-finger a launcher icon and the comically oversized hide/close buttons, but basically all graphical applications (even the tiny handful of redesigned Gnome apps) are still primarily designed to be used with a keyboard and mouse.
You need to throw that model out the window if you want a program to really work well on a touch screen. But if you do that, running the program on a desktop will be infuriating.
> You need to throw that model out the window if you want a program to really work well on a touch screen.
I'm not sure that you do. The main issue really is having big-enough controls, and supporting things like scrolling via touch. The nice thing about Gtk3 is that it heavily nudges designers to make their applications touch friendly.
Hardly. Microsoft did the same thing (or even started this trend) with Windows 8 but finally recognized they were wrong and did a almost a complete 180 with Windows 10.
Arguably, the tablet revolution never came, but the large smartphone revolution did. Software like PureOS en PostmarketOS exists because KDE and GNOME and other software was made touch-friendlier.
